The real revelation here is that people take this kind of Imaginary Internet Points seriously enough that there's a tool to algorithmically assess the quality of a project's GitHub stars[0].

Like: what?

Stars are basically the laziest possible way of doing anything with a repo besides looking at it. What possible signal of any value could anyone possibly hope to discern from a repo's star count? And yet not only is there an economy of counterfeit stars (flares? c.f. pieces of flair, which are equally meaningless. Also, the budget ones are ephemeral, just like a road flare), there are people who care so much about stars and flares that there's a whole 'nother economy behind discerning which are which.

Mind. Blown.

[0] Astronomer, mentioned in TFA https://github.com/Ullaakut/astronomer